The Odds Maker uses about 15 trading days of history to judge your strategy’s ability to produce winning trades. Some feedback received recently questions why 15 days? We also answer why it’s so important to keep winners larger than losers in The Odds Maker results.

1. The Odds Maker keeps you current with the market’s activity in that last near turn. On the weekend a program automatically runs maintenance on The Odds Maker. It gets cleaned out so that only two weeks worth of data remain. Then as trading days accumulate during the week new data is added until on Friday there is about 3 weeks worth of data.
2. When designing a strategy in The Odds Maker it is critical in the readout that the size of the Average Winner be substantially bigger than that of the Average Loser. Why is that? This is to account for slipage and commission and other market factors that are impossible for us to throw into the mix without adding complexity and programming that frankly doesn’t help you in terms of reward/effort. Basically, give yourself a handicap. Avoid the pitfall of an Average Winner being 2 to 5 cents bigger than an Average Loser and then relying on a system trading 50 times a day to make the large Net Gain.
3. Here are some example results from actual strategies that make good trading candidates. Get your results to look like these and you’ll be fishing in the right waters.

• Day Trade Long Strategy:
  170 / 249 = 68.27% up $0.01 in 30 minutes; Average winner = $0.8059, Average loser = $-0.2991, Net winnings = $118.09, Best = $4.22, Worst = $-2.68; Casino Factor = 100%

• Day Trade Short Strategy:
  355 / 511 = 69.47% down $0.01 in 30 minutes; Average winner = $0.7078, Average loser = $-0.2644, Net winnings = $215.23, Best = $3.39, Worst = $-1.13; Casino Factor = 100%

• Swing Trade Long:
  53 / 82 = 64.63% up $0.01 at the close; Average winner = $0.476, Average loser = $-0.3179, Net winnings = $16.0101, Best = $2.62, Worst = $-1.40; Casino Factor = 99.47%

  It takes some experimenting to tune into what the market is doing. Fortunately there are some additional resources available to help in the journey. We just finished a 3-part series on how to generate these kinds of results.

Keep up the feedback!